The morality of the state and its limits

Understanding the systemic causes of political violence

Cutting Through the Chaos with Wallace Garneau – Propaganda multiplies the effect. Foreign broadcasters, hostile regimes, and ideologues amplify grievances and blur truth. Purity politics and virtue signaling make belief a credential. Once people feel moral bankruptcy awaits them unless they accept contested claims, they become immune to evidence. That is the moment when rhetoric can tip into violence...

Gerrymandering and the crisis of legitimacy

Cutting Through the Chaos with Wallace Garneau – Gerrymandering becomes more than a mapmaking dispute as Americans lose faith in elections, courts, and democratic rules. Partisan redistricting exposes a deeper legitimacy crisis, where each side sees defeat as existential and the nation drifts toward tribal politics, mistrust, and a cold civil war that threatens the republic itself today...

The honest moral question behind abortion

Cutting Through the Chaos with Wallace Garneau – Abortion debates often hide behind slogans, but the central issue remains whether ending a developing human life can ever be justified. By framing abortion through justifiable homicide, the argument forces clearer moral distinctions around autonomy, personhood, dependency, fetal pain, parental rights, and the conditions under which killing becomes morally defensible...

The morality of the state and its limits

Cutting Through the Chaos with Wallace Garneau – Modern politics increasingly confuses personal morality with the responsibilities of government. By collapsing distinctions between mercy and justice, peace and surrender, and moral law and statecraft, leaders weaken nations from within. Biblical principles, just war tradition, immigration, economics, and cultural survival all reveal the consequences of abandoning moral clarity...

Why civil rights nonprofit organizations never declare victory

Cutting Through the Chaos with Wallace Garneau – This is why the old civil rights organizations cannot allow America to be understood as a country that has made enormous moral progress. Their relevance depends on the opposite claim. The SPLC cannot simply track actual extremists. It must expand the definition of extremism until normal political disagreement becomes “hate.”